10.5.3: Apple, Fix Exposé Keybindings!

Looks like Apple’s been busy. Really, to make me happy Apple would only have to fix one single thing: Exposé’s delicate preferences.

Since 10.5.1 WoW eats my Expose preferences if I run it full screen. I play a ‘lock so I switch between Full Screen and Windowed frequently. Basically, if I run WoW in full screen, it takes over my function keys and when it releases them back to the system Leopard totally forgets what I had bound to them. Like woah.

Apple hasn’t acknowledged the problem. I had hoped 10.5.2 would fix it, but it didn’t. Reading this thread leaves us with a few clues as to the back and forth between Blizzard and Apple.

Tigerclaw, a Blizzard Technical Support Rep says:

Every time we have tried to fix it, we have come away with the assessment that it is an OS bug.

Now this makes sense to me because Aperture 1.5.7 also causes my Exposé preferences to be erased if, and only if, I run it in Full Screen mode. This bug quietly disappeared from Aperture 2.0 which makes me wonder if Apple hacked in a kludge so that they could keep ignoring a more complicated underlying problem.

What’s even more interesting is that shadows of this bug seem to have been around even in the Tiger days. If we go back to WoW patch 1.6.1 (which was more than a year ago) we find a quick and dirty “workaround” under the “Macs” section:

Worked around an issue where you would lose your Expose/Dashboard preferences if you crashed or asserted while in fullscreen mode on Mac OS X 10.4.

Tigerclaw vents a little:

Radar 4180173, filed 13-Jul-2005

It should be pointed out that WoW makes exactly the calls needed, as documented by Apple, to restore keybindings on exit.

But, there is a bug. We filed a bug on it two years ago. It’s in the OS.

There’s an ugly workaround involving a new preferences pane and some Applescript in that post, but that doesn’t make it any better.